PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  In “Fiume o Morte!,” the director Igor Bezinović combines nonfiction elements with fictionalizations of historical events—and reveals the behind-the-scenes creation of these reënactments, turning the work into a documentary about its own making.     “Fiume o Morte!” Brilliantly Dramatizes the Rise of a Demagogue Igor Bezinović’s film thrusts century-old archival footage into the present, restaging the brazen reign of an autocrat whose tactics feel startlingly resonant today.

  It only took 74 days for Donald Trump to smash the global economic order. Why did he decide to blow up a century’s worth of globalization?

  Back when Chloë Sevigny was “a 19-year-old that has done nothing,” Jay McInerney profiled her for The New Yorker. The piece had a huge impact on Naomi Fry. “Despite not having done much at that point besides be young, hang out downtown, and have an innate sense of style, Sevigny seemed to be the font from which absolute cool flowed,” Fry writes. Read her full consideration of McInerney on Sevigny.

  Remember when Donald Trump told people that they’d get tired of winning once he was in office? The federal courts seem to say otherwise.

  Regardless of the prospects of Trump’s tariffs boosting U.S. manufacturing over the long term, in the short term they are likely to inflict pain on two major constituents of the G.O.P. coalition: working-class MAGA voters and Republicans in business.

  The release of “Magazine Dreams,” starring Jonathan Majors, has facilitated one of the more disturbing redemption tours in the wake of #MeToo reportage, Doreen St. Félix writes.

  As much as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert often clashed, there was a key thing they shared: neither was a movie person.

 

  Reading Catullus in a college Latin course, Daniel Mendelsohn came across an unfamiliar word: irrumator, which the poet used to describe a provincial governor for whom he had worked. “You may render that word as ‘bastard,’ ” his professor said, a little too loudly. That evening, Mendelsohn looked up the word. The verb inrumō—the root of irrumator—means “to give suck, abuse obscenely.” “I grinned, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what Catullus was calling the governor,” Mendelsohn writes. “Just how you can call your boss a skullfucker and still maintain a reputation for refined erudition and literary sophistication was a question that stumped me,” he continues. “As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one.” On the one hand, Catullus was an impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us. On the other, he was a refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, wh...

  On Monday, a criminal court in France found Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, and barred her from running for the French Presidency in 2027. Isaac Chotiner speaks with an expert about what the decision means for the future of French politics.

 

  In Katie Kitamura’s new novel, “Audition,” a middle-aged actress in New York City is struggling to interpret a scene in a play when a much younger man walks into the theatre and breaks open the plot of her life. Before writing the book, Kitamura had become interested in the role performance plays in our day-to-day lives. “There are all these parts that we play every single day, and they come with quite prescriptive scripts,” Kitamura said. “The thing that struck me when I was thinking about ‘Audition’ is how seamlessly we flip between parts almost without being aware of it.” She designed the book to be read in several ways. “I’ve come to see it almost as a bit of a Rorschach blot: which side of the book readers think is true, or right side up, versus which is upside down says something about their own desires. What do you want to be true? What do you prefer to be a fantasy? That was one of my endeavors in writing the book—so it’s not really an either-or but both. I...

  Sarah Stillman reports on a sweeping and uniquely American legal doctrine: felony murder, which sends thousands of people to prison for life for murders they didn't commit.

  In 1964, on their first world tour, the Beatles took pictures that have only recently been discovered. What do they show us?

  Parker Posey's quirky performances—spiky, daffy, ruthless—make each of her parts memorable. Read an interview from 2022 with the “White Lotus” star, in which she discusses getting into show business.

  The third season of “The White Lotus,” which concludes tonight, is “about death,” the show’s creator, Mike White, said. “But I also find it maybe the funniest season.”

  “Every citizen, but certainly every university person, should be expressing outrage” about the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education and its targeting of students, the president of Wesleyan said.

 

  The Trump Administration is on a legal losing streak. “Making preposterous arguments, employing disrespectful language, and treating judges like obstreperous obstacles rather than life-tenured members of a coequal branch does nothing to help its cause,” Ruth Marcus writes.

Work-life balance is overrated, right? In New Yorker Humor, in-office employees share how much fun they're having. You Love the Office. “My deskmate smells like roadkill, just like my roommate. It’s like I never left home.”

 

 

  The term “brainwashing” may harken back to the Cold War, but lately, it’s come back into fashion. Why? One potential answer is the rise of technologies suspected of having mind-controlling powers, chief among them social media. Another is the entrenched political polarization of our time. When your cousin starts spouting unhinged certainties about viruses, vaccines, and climate change, you might wonder: What happened to him? Could he have been . . . brainwashed? Don’t get smug; he’s wondering the same thing about you. Accusations of brainwashing aren’t neutral claims; they offer a particular explanation for why someone holds beliefs we find preposterous. That explanation attributes those beliefs to deliberate manipulation instead of rational argument or personal conviction. In doing so, it may recast those with “deplorable” beliefs as victims rather than agents, deserving of not just condemnation but sympathy—and, perhaps, treatment. Labelling people as brainwashed casts them as ...

  Some will argue that “Warfare” evades context, Justin Chang writes, but it’s hard to come away from the film “and see the American military’s presence in Iran as anything but a violent, misguided intrusion.”

  A series of tender, exacting black-and-white photographs captures the daily walks Julia and Paul Child took almost every day during their years in France.

 

 

  Those isolating work-from-home years are over—it’s time to come back to the office and have some fun with your coworkers! Not convinced? See some employee testimonials about the joys of being back in person.  

  After weeks of nervous anticipation in the financial markets and in the capitals of America’s trading partners, Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have arrived, and, even by his standards, they are shockingly high and wide-ranging. After delivering a potted economic history of the country in which he bizarrely claimed that the Great Depression would have been avoided if high tariffs had been in place, Trump announced that “reciprocal tariffs” would go into effect on April 9th, with rates of 34 per cent on goods imported from China, 24 per cent on Japan, and 20 per cent on the European Union. Some of the highest rates were reserved for export-led developing countries in Asia: 46 per cent on Vietnam, 48 per cent on Laos, and 49 per cent on Cambodia. These levies are separate from the ones Trump has already imposed on steel, aluminum, and foreign-made cars and parts. “Taken as a whole, his tariffs represent a dramatic expansion from the more narrowly targeted duties he imposed ...

 

 

  Ann RTL Patchett on how the death of her friend’s father inspired her to get rid of useless possessions: “I found little things that had become important over time for no reason other than that I’d kept them for so long.” How to Practice. I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death.

  Researchers have found that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs, even when it’s wrong. Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

  By the standards of world-historical events, Donald Trump’s Wednesday afternoon speech in the Rose Garden on his 74th day since returning to the White House started out remarkably forgettable. Trump opened the event he had billed as America’s “Liberation Day” with a rant about the dire state of the nation. It was familiar material. But, by the time Trump was finished, it was clear we’ve never actually seen anything like it. “The global trade war that he’d so long threatened and somehow never actually triggered now finally seemed to be happening,” Susan B. Glasser writes. Even as Trump spoke, the initial verdict from financial markets around the world came in and it was catastrophic—a global meltdown. The tariffs were worse than expected; stock market futures plunged; the dollar dropped against other currencies. By the close of the markets on Thursday, the damage was all too evident: U.S. stocks had recorded their biggest drop in years, losing close to three trillion dollars in va...